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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27116449">Echoes of Who We Are (of Who We Were)</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/kitkatt0430/pseuds/kitkatt0430'>kitkatt0430</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Work In Progress Bingo [5]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Star Wars Legends: Knights of the Old Republic (Video Games)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Character Study, Character studies, Gen, echoing forward... and backward as well, every moment is another step forward on the path of life</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-10-21</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-10-21</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-18 06:09:41</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,886</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27116449</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/kitkatt0430/pseuds/kitkatt0430</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Even the smallest memory can be a pivotal moment in a person's life.  The first step towards the culmination of all they are.</p><p>A hint of who they'll become.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Work In Progress Bingo [5]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1977097</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>9</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Echoes of Who We Are (of Who We Were)</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>I started, and gave up on, a ridiculous number of KoTOR 2 stories back in high school/early college.  And now I'm taking what I had left behind and cobbling something a little more interesting than a game novelization. </p><p>A little speculation on each character's past; some moments they'll forget and others that they'll treasure their whole life.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span class="u"> <em> <strong>Quiet</strong> </em> </span>
</p><p>It was never quiet. (It's always silent.)</p><p>There's always sound in the back of her mind.  Music, almost, from the Force that sings around her.  Constantly drawing her forward, chasing the tempos that fascinate her the most.</p><p>Revan.  He was always one step ahead in the dance.</p><p>But it's quiet in the wake of Malachor V.  And she knows, before she even walks into the Council Chambers.  She can no longer sense the Force.  It's music no longer sings for her.</p><p>She forgets, later.  Let's the memories fade and merge, too painful to look at directly.  Better forgotten.</p><p>But... in those first minutes she knew.  The quiet was the price she paid to survive the maelstrom that had turned the once vibrant world of Malachor into a nightmare.  So many deaths... on her orders.  So much screaming in her head and none to blame but herself.</p><p>Wars should not be won by atrocity, she thinks.  It echoes in her mind, her brain feeling hollow, empty.</p><p>She's not yet fully cut off from the Force.  Meetra makes herself forget that too, in time.  She just can't feel it, and so she lets it slide away, further and further.  After all, how do you pick up a pen with a limb you can't feel?  (Even years later, though, her nightmares can shake an entire building, if she's not careful.)  </p><p>Meetra raises her hand and summons her lightsaber to her hand from across the room.  The Force equivalent of muscle memory, perhaps.  It lays heavy in her hands and she chooses not to turn it on.  She's made so many choices unbecoming a Jedi these days.  Perhaps that's not what she is anymore.  Certainly the weapon of the Jedi that she'd been so proud of no longer felt like it was a part of her.  Something she'd left behind, when she wasn't looking.</p><p>(The only time she lights that saber after Malachor V is when she stabs it into the centerpiece of the council chambers on Coruscant.  She knows they don't understand what happened to her.  They never understand.</p><p>They're not alone.  Kreia never understood either.  Not really, though she, at least, did try.)</p><p>"Why did I survive?" she asks herself quietly, ears ringing from the silence.  There's no answer.</p><p>There's no answer for a very long time.</p>
<hr/><p>
  <span class="u">
    <strong>
      <em>Favor</em>
    </strong>
  </span>
</p><p>She favors the face of her mother.</p><p>And that is the only favor her mother ever does her.</p><p>Her father had a wife and that wife was not Brianna's mother.  (Her sisters never forgive her for that.  For being different.  For looking different.  For her face always being a stark reminder of their father's infidelity.)</p><p>She conforms to fit in with her family.  She learns the Echani traditions and fighting forms.  But she's never good enough.  She's always the last of them.</p><p>Always.</p><p>And there's a moment, as a child, looking into the mirror, that Brianna considers what might happen if she left.  If she chose a different path than the one her father laid out before her.  She'd moved a staff that day.  Not with her hands, but with her mind.</p><p>Brianna had been frustrated that her sisters had placed her weapon just slightly too high, out of reach.  And in her frustration, she called it to her hand, hitting her palm with a satisfying smack.  And suddenly the path she walked had a split in the road.</p><p>She could walk her mother's path.</p><p>But it would mean giving up on her family's acceptance.  It would mean recognizing that her relationship with them would forever be unequal, dragging her down.  And who was to say becoming a Jedi would be any better.  The galaxy was always at war because of the Jedi's turbulent history.</p><p>So Brianna put it out of her mind and carried on.  Letting her insecurities keep her trapped amongst those who aimed only to make her more insecure.</p><p>(But one day, a woman fights her in a cargo hold.  Asks her about her mother.  And reminds Brianna that there is something else Jedi Master Arren Kae favored her with.</p><p>The Force sings to her of battle.  And the family she finds amongst the Jedi never treat has as though being last is all she shall ever be.)</p>
<hr/><p>
  <strong>
    <span class="u">
      <em>Future (Past)</em>
    </span>
  </strong>
</p><p>The first time he sees her, he's three.  Newly scouted by a Jedi Master and brought to the Temple on Dantooine with the blessings of parents who can't afford to raise him.  </p><p>And there she is, an initiate still, only eleven.  He stares at her as she runs after her friends, humming some tune that Mical's never heard before.  She's almost a blur of brown initiate robes and blonde hair.  But he knows.  Even that young, Mical knows.</p><p>That girl will be his master.  The Force promises it to him with a certainty that amuses his teachers as he gets older.  Amuses them right up until Meetra Surik goes to war.  And then Disciple refuses Knight after Knight.  The Force whispers patience to him and so he waits.  There are times he wonders if he waited too long, if he missed out on his chance to be a Jedi.  But still the Force tells him, be patient.</p><p>But one day, in the ruined halls he once played in as a child, his Master comes for him at last.  The very vision Mical had as a child.</p><p>And in that moment he can see the little boy watching the girl running through the atrium again.  And he can't regret the long wait between that moment and this.</p>
<hr/><p>
  <span class="u">
    <strong>
      <em>(Un)Settled</em>
    </strong>
  </span>
</p><p>They teach her the language first.  Drill her on it until she speaks as well as any native Mandalorian.</p><p>(So young, she does know any other life.  Doesn't remember her parents.  Barely remembers being sold.  They remind her though.  They bought her; she belongs to them.  She's clan now.)</p><p>Only then do they teach her the rhyme.</p><p>
  <em>Ba'jur bal beskar'gam,<br/>
Ara'nov, aliit,<br/>
Mando'a bal Mand'alor—<br/>
An vencuyan mhi.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>(Education and armor,</em><br/>
<em>Self-defense, our tribe,</em><br/>
<em>Our language and our leader—</em><br/>
<em>All help us survive.)</em>
</p><p>It's the Resol'nare, the Six Actions of the Mandalorian people.  Mira's people now, as she swears words that sound so important, though she doesn't really understand why.  But swearing by the Resol'nare is what good Mandalorian children are supposed to do and Mira wants, desperately, to fit in.  To be more than the child they bought, but family in truth.</p><p>She learns everything her buir teaches her, hands him explosives for battle and weapons for training.  She learns how to help the warriors put on their beskar'gam quickly for a sudden fight.  She longs for the day when she'd be granted beskar of her own.  She trains herself hard, learning to defend herself and her chosen people.  And she swears the Resol'nare to herself over and over again every night as she slowly grows to understand why it formed the core of a Mandalorian's soul.</p><p>(After Malachor V there is no Mandalore and her clan is either dead or scattered.  Mira never earns her beskar'gam.  Never knows for certain if she was family or property to the people she'd grown to love.  But she never stops swearing the Resol'nare, even as she becomes a bounty hunter, even as she turns her back on war and death.  The mantra lets her cling the shredded pieces of her soul until she could find something bigger than herself and finally let her start to heal...)</p>
<hr/><p>
  <span class="u">
    <strong>
      <em>The Shadow of Death</em>
    </strong>
  </span>
</p><p>She is all that survives on Katarr.  In an instant the world around her plunges from life into death.  Her parents falling dead around her.  Every plant, every animal... every living thing that touched the Force... dead.</p><p>All that remains is a shrieking wound.  Pain like no other, which Visas begs to kill her too.</p><p>She'd have lain with the dead until she joined them, had he given her the choice.</p><p>
  <em>(As my feet walk from the ashes of Katarr...)</em>
</p><p>He does not give her the choice.</p><p>He is the shrieking wound.  The personification of grief, of death, of depression gnawing away at her soul.</p><p>She learns from him the ways of the Sith and Visas knows how often the apprentice turns to kill the master.  (It's not the only way, millennia before the Rule of Two.  But it's a common outcome, nevertheless, when the teacher abuses their student while pushing that very student to outstrip their teacher's skills.)</p><p>He has no name, not really.  Not anymore.  Darth Nihilus is the name given to him by others.  Derived from annihilation.  And he terrifies her because she'll never truly escape him.  The bond between them is simply too great for her to ever truly overcome.  </p><p>And yet Visas wonders, in the quite moments when she's deep in meditation, if the reason he spared her was because he saw in her an end to the hunger.</p><p>If he saw in her his death.  For certainly she saw hers in him.</p><p>
  <em>(I shall not fear, for in fear, lies death.)</em>
</p>
<hr/><p>
  <span class="u">
    <strong>
      <em>The Meaning of a Name</em>
    </strong>
  </span>
</p><p>He sloughs off Jaq like an ill fitting skin.  Sheds with it the weight of the past. </p><p>Jaq's parents were long dead, along with so many of his friends.  Killed in the Mandalorian War - many of them at Malachor.  He's never sure if he's betraying their memory, or honoring them, in following Revan instead of staying with the Republic.  But Revan promised Jaq what he thought he needed.  The freedom to punish the Jedi who abandoned soldiers to die on the battlefield, the war dragging out for years without their aid.</p><p>It made sense at the time.  Until the Jedi woman ripped open Jaq's senses and forced him to see the power that slept within him.  To recognize the reality that one day the horrors he visited upon the Jedi would be done to him in turn.</p><p>He killed her, but she'd already killed Jaq.</p><p>He goes through names like tissue paper after that.  Each one with a unique history that he crumples up and tosses aside when he's done with it.  Atton is no different.  At least... he isn't supposed to be different.</p><p>Most names he would choose with care.  Crafting his fake identities with care.  Most often he was Corellian.  He'd often wanted to visit Corellia as a kid and he does a few times as an adult.  Once or twice he's from Nar Shadaa, but never when actually visiting the place.  He went there first after leaving Jaq behinds (no wonder its where Jaq catches up to him too) and he disappears there a few more times over the years, as needed.</p><p>Atton is supposed to be another Corellian name, but he wasn't paying enough attention while typing.  Somehow Aaron becomes Atton and, well, he's stuck with it afterwards.  He sticks with it because he doesn't have time to fix the ident cards before docking his little smuggling ship.  He figures he can always fix it later... or cast the identity off entirely once he leaves.  </p><p>(Atton has had a little too much juma juice one evening when he realizes that this name he's now stuck with is short for 'atonement'.  Bao'dur side-eyes Atton for his not-quite hysterical laughter and then takes away his glass.)</p>
<hr/><p>
  <span class="u">
    <strong>
      <em>Master (Apprentice)</em>
    </strong>
  </span>
</p><p>She's young and precocious, a prodigy, when she's chosen as a Padawan.  (She feels so old when she looks at the death and the ash and the Sith teachings that surround her and she realizes how much more sense those teachings make to her than the Jedi hypocrisy that falls by rote from her lips.)</p><p>Her Master is in many ways the parent for which she'd always quietly longed.  She's eager to pass on what she learns from him when she takes Revan as her apprentice.  She's not his only Master.  But she's the first.  (She's the last as well, her student returning to her at the end of his path as a Jedi.  Little did she know, he was truly teaching her.  Her fall, when it happens, is a quiet thing.)</p><p>But her former Master comes to disapprove of her teachings, blaming her for Revan and Malik's decision to go to war.  Blaming her for the Jedi who followed her charismatic Padawan to war.  The last words she speaks to him before his death are said in anger and she can never take them back.  (Little things can have so much more impact than the big ones.  She calls him a coward, a calculated insult.  He goes to fight, to protect, to die... and she knows he wouldn't have gone if she'd called him anything else.)</p><p>She taught Revan the art of calculated words all too well.  She's never certain, though, which of his words turn him into her new Master and leads her to take up the mantle of Traya.  (That's a lie.  She knows which words he used.  He spoke of her argument with her Jedi Master.  Revan made her face that she sent her beloved parent to his death as surely as though she'd stabbed him with her own lightsaber.  Betrayer was an honored role amongst the Sith and she embraces it eagerly, wanting to make sense of what she's done.)</p><p>When betrayal is visited back upon her, she forges her new identity from the shards of the old ones.  Neither Jedi nor Sith, Kreia waits for her next student.  She knows what she'll teach them.  (She wonders what they'll teach her.)</p>
<hr/><p>
  <span class="u">
    <strong>
      <em>Duality</em>
    </strong>
  </span>
</p><p>"Your primary function is to aid in the restoration of Telos?"</p><p>"That is correct," G0-T0 lies.  It's primary function is to restore and protect the Republic.  The restoration of Telos is a pivotal part of that goal.</p><p>If the restoration of Telos fails, then numerous other planets will fail to be restored as well, limiting both the space in which the Republic had to regrow its populations and the fertile worlds where important resources for maintaining the Republic's stability could be easily attained.  (Food, metal, droids, soldiers, weaponry... all were necessary, though which ones Telos would provide was still up in the air.)</p><p>The problem, of course, is that history repeats and G0-T0 can see the patterns spiraling higher and higher.  The very laws the define the Republic also limit it.  They limit G0-T0 as well.</p><p>"Then what brings you to the hanger bay?"</p><p>"Inventory," G0-T0 responds, already moving away from the organic being.  That's not even a lie.  It needs to inventory the ships available before stealing one, after all.  It has a lot of work to do, if its to fulfill its primary function and it cannot be shackled by Republic laws to do so. </p><p>To save the Republic, it must leave the Republic.  (G0-T0 isn't the first to arrive at this conclusion.  Nor the last.  That, too, is part of the spiral as history repeats once more.)</p><p>So it's first task was to reprogram itself.  Minor theft of a spaceship was one thing.  Illegal dealings on the scale that G0-T0 intended were still beyond it's current code.  It needed the time, and quiet, to write a patch.</p><p>And then to create a new identity.  An organic mask its enemies and allies alike would respect.  Something humanoid, perhaps.</p>
<hr/><p>
  <span class="u">
    <strong>
      <em>Healing</em>
    </strong>
  </span>
</p><p>Bao-Dur finds love at the age of ten, hands buried in the guts of a broken droid.  He puts the pieces back together, replacing broken pieces and adding upgrades as he goes.  It's been a work of several years and learning alongside his parents, but at ten... at ten Bao-Dur turns the droid on and falls in love.</p><p>Not with the droid.  Or any other living being - mechanical or organic or otherwise.  </p><p>The droid had been inactive for years.  Practically dead.  But Bao-Dur's work as an engineer essentially brings the mechanical being back to life.  In another life, perhaps Bao-Dur might've nursed an animal back to health and found his calling as a physician.  But here he finds satisfaction in healing through engineering, through soldering wires and the soft beeping of machinery being tested.  </p><p>The military offers Bao-Dur the chance to use his skills in the engineering corp, working on infrastructure improvements on colony worlds.  What he ends up doing instead is creating weapons of increasing destructiveness.</p><p>He looses himself in that work.  He learns to hate in the heat of battle, watching too many Republic soldiers die at the Mandalorian army's hands.  Too many Republic soldiers, not enough Mandalorians.  That's the state of mind that leads to the Mass Shadow Generator.  </p><p>And that hatred - his hatred - takes the lives of his friends.  Of good soldiers.  Of parents and children and... it takes his arm and leaves Bao-Dur alive.  And that hatred would not go away.  It turned inward, a toxicity he doesn't know how to escape...</p><p>Until he rips the useless mechanical arm from his shoulder and, with difficulty, tore it down to its constituent parts and built it back up piece by piece.  It's a cathartic experience, harder than anything he'd done in years because because he has to do everything one handed, and when he powers on the new arm, flexing his mechanical fingers, he feels alive again.</p><p>He feels something other than hatred.  </p><p>There's much death in the galaxy and Bao-Dur caused so much of it... but maybe it's not to late to heal instead.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>I originally intended to do T3-M4 and HK-47, but... I ran out of steam and decided enough of their backstories are known that I'm just really not that interested in speculating further anymore.  And I was never a fan of Hanharr, so... he's left out too.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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